Dweezil Zappa: Raisin’ more than lonely dental floss

Dweezil Zappa picks up the zircon-encrusted tweezers by keeping his father’s music alive. He and his band are at the House of Blues in Boston Saturday for a show and a guitar master class.

By Ed Symkus/CORRESPONDENT

Wicked Local

By Ed Symkus/CORRESPONDENT

Posted Oct. 30, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated Oct 30, 2013 at 9:08 PM

By Ed Symkus/CORRESPONDENT

Posted Oct. 30, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated Oct 30, 2013 at 9:08 PM

BOSTON

» Social News

It’s got to be hard enough just trying to make your living as a professional musician. Never mind that your last name is Zappa.

Dweezil Zappa is doing more than just carrying on the name of his father - the iconic, offbeat, brilliant composer-arranger-guitarist Frank Zappa - he’s keeping Frank’s music alive.

He brings his six-piece band Zappa Plays Zappa to House of Blues on Nov. 2 for a 40th anniversary performance of the album "The Roxy & Elsewhere."

"That record is quite a standout in Frank’s catalogue," said Zappa, 44, by phone from a tour stop at Kent State University in Ohio. "It has a fantastic combination of rock and blues and it’s got some avant garde moments, but it’s really groovy and funky throughout. He did a lot of great guitar playing on it, and there’s some fantastic instrumental stuff, like ‘Echidna’s Arf’ and ‘Don’t You Ever Wash That Thing?’ They’re really challenging to play, and ‘The Be-Bop Tango’ is really hard; that melody is a real beast."

But Zappa is up to the challenge. He got his first guitar at 6, got serious about playing it when he was 12, around the time he started listening to what he now calls the "really aggressive sound" of Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads, and often committed to practicing eight or 10 hours a day.

"When I started getting into it, that was pretty much all I was doing," he said. "I didn’t care about going to parties or any of the stuff that others were into. I did play some baseball, but I switched to guitar."

He admits to being strongly influenced by Frank’s complex and complicated music, but one of his earliest mentors was Van Halen, who produced Zappa’s first recording, "My Mother Is a Space Cadet," when he was 12. He was soon on a path, of writing and playing and recording. But a time came when he decided to put his own music aside, and do something about Frank’s.

"There were many occasions," he said, "where I was noticing that if there were people under 30, and someone would bring up his name, somebody else would say, ‘Who?’ "

Zappa’s belief is that, in the same sense that an orchestra’s responsibility is to make sure that music that was created in the past that was modern and sophisticated and had brilliant ideas is carried forward to future generations, there was a reason to do the same for the music of his father, who died in 1993. So in 2006 he created Zappa Plays Zappa.

He began the project by first sitting down and listening to all of his dad’s albums, in order of release, from the Mothers of Invention to the solo work

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"The purpose of that was to focus on the way I wanted to present the music," he explained. "Seeing what he did, chronologically, you can see certain themes that are connected and introduced and get picked up and come back. I also wanted to emphasize what I thought were the iconic melodies and compositions, and reeducate the audience. Unfortunately the people that have casual exposure to Frank’s music are hearing things like ‘Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow’ or ‘Dancing Fool.’ If that’s all they’ve ever heard of Frank’s music, that doesn’t represent the totality of his work. But that’s where the majority of airplay came from, and that’s why there’s this misperception. A lot of people think of it as novelty music. I wanted to deemphasize that aspect of it."

Then he rounded up the best musicians he could find.

"The process I went through for putting the band together was to find players that had the right attitude," he said. "And by that I mean being responsible for learning your parts, and knowing your parts very well, and sticking to your parts. Oftentimes what happens is people decide to veer away from what their role is and they try to draw more attention to what they’re doing, but that doesn’t necessarily suit the music. Frank would fire people for doing that kind of stuff. So my goal was to put that kind of band together."

As a leader, Zappa doesn’t just pick the players and choose the songs and play guitar. When the band goes out on the road, he begins a regimen of very long days.

"I’m up well before the band," he said. "I do interviews and things, I [sometimes] have a guitar masterclass I do before sound check, then we do sound check, then we do the show, then I usually listen to the show after the show, and then I get up and do it all again."

He’s also still learning songs from his prolific dad’s catalogue. He’s currently working on "Watermelon in Easter Hay" from "Joe’s Garage." And since the band is, after all, called Zappa Plays Zappa, he tends, once in a while, to throw one of his own tunes into the set.

"We did one of mine on a tour last year," he said. "A song called ‘Boodledang’ from a record called ‘Music for Pets.’ We were on tour in the summer, and we had quite a bit of rock material in the show, and we just took a detour with this song because it was so silly. It was fun to get the audience to participate in singing ‘Your mom’s carpet is a Boodledang.’ "